Google Goggles Coming to the iPhone Soon, Says Google

Google confirmed that its Goggles visual search application would be coming to Apple's iPhone soon. This is a big step in helping Goggles reach a broader audience. Google apps such as search, Google Maps and YouTube are popular on the iPhone, which has shipped more than 50 million units. Google also said it would release the image recognition technology that powers Goggles via APIs by the end of the year. Google just launched APIs for Google Latitude and Google Buzz to let programmers feed off of its work.

Google confirmed that its Goggles visual search
application would be coming to Apple's iPhone soon and also said it would
release APIs for its image recognition, according to this scoop from ReadWriteWeb.
Google Goggles
is a mobile application that lets users take a picture of a location or objects
such as a product or painting from their smartphone and do a Google search that
pulls up information associated with the image.

The image a user snaps with his or her camera is a query
that gets sent to Google's cloud computing data centers and processed with
computer vision algorithms.

The application is available for smartphones based
on Google's Android operating system version 1.6 and up and is a popular draw
among users of the Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One and HTC Droid Incredible.
But it has thus far been relegated to Android, limiting its exposure
to the No. 3 mobile operating system in the U.S. behind RIM's
Blackberry and Apple's iPhone.
Google Goggles Product Manager Shailesh Nalawadi
confirmed at an augmented reality event in Santa Clara, Calif. June 4 that Goggles
would makes its way to the iPhone soon. A spokesperson confirmed the happening,
but declined to provide more clarity into the timing.
This is a big step in helping Goggles reach a broader
audience. Google apps such as search, Google Maps and YouTube are popular on
the iPhone, which has shipped more than 50 million units. Apple is launching iPhone 4.0 at its Worldwide Developer
Conference today.
Apple's relationship with Google has been rocky, thanks to actions such as Apple's rejection of Google Voice on the iPhone for
competition's sake. However, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said he has no plans to dump Google as the
default search provider on the iPhone or iPad tablet.
Nalawadi also said Google would release the image
recognition technology that powers Goggles via APIs by the end of the year.
Google,
which just launched APIs for Google Latitude and
Google Buzz, is no stranger to releasing the programming interfaces that gets
developers writing additional applications, plug-ins or other Web services for
its existing apps.
"APIs are good and we would love to offer
recognition capabilities as APIs eventually," Nalawadi said, according to the
ReadWriteWeb post.
Google is also steadily expanding the coverage of
Goggles. The app launched with support for locations, art, products, barcodes
and other objects, but Google will extend that to other images over time.
Google May 6 added text translation to the new Version
1.1 of its Google Goggles application, allowing travelers to other countries to
take pictures of text and read them in their native language.
Now travelers to other countries can take pictures of
street signs, restaurant menus and other text and read them in their native
language. This stranger in a strange land scenario is currently the primary use
case for Goggles.